What follows is an email sent internally to Oracle Solaris Engineers which describes Oracle’s true intentions toward the OpenSolaris project and the future of Oracle Solaris.

This concludes over four years that I (and many other external contributors) have worked on the OpenSolaris project. This is a terrible sendoff for countless hours of work – for quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis.

I can only maintain that the software we worked on was for the betterment of all, not for any one company’s bottom line. This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit.

OpenSolaris users have two choices. They can wait for Oracle to deliver a free Solaris binary called Solaris 11 Express, available with optional support, by the end of the year, ahead of the full release of the next-generation commercial Solaris 11 rev next year or they can hope that Illumos, the new Nextenta-led OpenSolaris fork, turns into something.